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As part of our Anniversary Celebrations we are once again hosting a Dream Auction on Saturday, October 20, 2018.  Everyone is welcome to join us, please invite your friends and neighbours, too!  Come out to have some fun, enjoy some great desserts and bid on some fantastic prizes and gifts, all the while supporting the general and mission work of St. Andrew's.

bout a dozen years ago, there was a United States congressman named Lynn Westmoreland who cosponsored a bill to place the Ten Commandments in the U.S. House of Representatives and in the Senate. He also had another bill that would permit the Ten Commandments to be displayed in courthouses throughout the land. That proposed legislation, and some of the things that happened as a result of it, are very interesting to me. It illustrates to me some of the ambivalence that I feel about the Ten Commandments and the Old Testament law.

      On the one hand, there is absolutely no question that the laws of free, democratic countries like Canada and the United States owe a great debt to the Old Testament Law of Moses as well as other ancient law codes like the Twelve Tables of Ancient Rome and the Code of Hammurabi. For that reason, the Congress and law courts might seem to be a very good place to display such a thing.

      But there were many who objected to Westmoreland’s bill, not because they denied the historical importance of the Ten Commandments, but because they worried about the message that such a display would send. Did the presence of this Judeo-Christian law imply that only Christians (and maybe Jews) could expect the laws of the United States to defend their rights? Would those who did not acknowledge the Old Testament be able to expect the same treatment before the law as those who did? Those are exactly the kinds of difficult questions that always come up whenever you discuss the place of secular and religious law within our society.
ut, of course,

      But there was another very interesting thing that happened in the midst of that particular discussion. The congressman appeared on a television show called The Colbert Report where this happened;

     

      And I am honestly not very surprised that, when Stephen Colbert asked the congressman to tell him what the Ten Commandments were, he couldn’t do it. How many of us really could? And that tells me something else about our attitude towards them. We may revere them, but it’s not really because of their contents. We revere them because of what they symbolize to us. In fact, it often seems to matter little to us what they actually say.

      But I happen to believe that it is actually very important for us to know what the Ten Commandments say and what they mean. We need to treat them as more than just a symbol. This is not because I think that we need to begin to apply them directly to our modern secular society. Most of them weren’t designed for our kind of society. But as Christians, we need to understand what they are actually about. So I am glad that the upcoming section of the Catechism deals with the Ten Commandments.

      But before we start to look at the individual commandments, we need to start with a more fundamental question: why are they there at all? What is their deeper purpose? Because I think that a lot of people would say that they know what the commandments are for, even if they are not quite sure what the commandments say. They are there, people assume, to keep order and make sure that people conform to expectations. They are there to curtail freedom – not in a bad way necessarily, but hopefully in a way that makes it easier for us all to all live together. Most of all, people seem to assume, the commandments are there in order to make sure that people who behave wrongly are punished.

      That is how we talk about the use of the commandments and their importance. That is why lawmakers like Westmoreland want to put copies of the Ten Commandments on public display, as a way to impose order. But is that the purpose behind the commandments that we find in the scriptures? What does it say? What does Moses say when the Commandments are given? Well, the purpose of the commandments is not only given in the Book of Deuteronomy. It is given in such a way as to make sure that that purpose is not forgotten and is passed down from generation to generation.

      This is what Deuteronomy reports that Moses said: “When your children ask you in time to come, ‘What is the meaning of the decrees and the statutes and the ordinances that the Lord our God has commanded you?’ then you shall say to your children, ‘We were Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt, but the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand.’” Moses goes on to tell the people of all that God did to save them from slavery and bring them into a Promised Land and concludes with, “‘Then the Lord commanded us to observe all these statutes, to fear the Lord our God, for our lasting good’”

      When asked what the purpose of the commandments is, Moses doesn’t say “conformity.” He doesn’t say “limits on freedom” or “punishment.” He says, “Because you were once slaves.” And when you really dig into the contents of the commandments (instead of just treating them like a symbol whose contents don’t matter), I believe that you will discover that that is indeed the ideal that lies behind all of them. When you read them right, you can see that they are all about being free from slavery and especially about making sure we don’t fall back into slavery again.

      Now, in weeks to come, the Catechism that has been guiding us all this year will begin to take us through the Ten Commandments one by one and we  will have the opportunity to dig into the real meaning and application of some of them. Today I want us to think about how we approach them as a whole – what attitude we need to bring.

      Well, the Book of Deuteronomy makes it quite easy to discover that attitude. We need to read them as former slaves. Isn’t that interesting? It suggests that people who have a direct experience of slavery – the descendants of former black slaves for example or others who have lived under circumstances where they were less than free – would probably have an easier time grasping the meaning of the commandments than most of us. That is not how we usually think about such things. For a long time, privileged people – people who can afford more education and, to be blunt, white western people – have argued that they are the ones who can best interpret the meaning of the Bible. Moses here suggests that they are not.

      But, despite our handicap, despite our long experience of freedom, we need to try. We need to do our best to approach these commandments as they are supposed to be approached. So try to put yourself in that frame of mind. Imagine yourself as an ancient Hebrew, recently released (beyond all hope and expectation) from slavery in Egypt. With that in mind, how might the commandments sound different to you? Take the commandment against idols, for example: “You shall not make for yourself an idol” or, as it is sometimes translated, “a graven image.”

      Well, a slave in Egypt would have been very familiar with graven images. Images of the Egyptian gods would have surrounded them on every side. But they were all the gods of their oppressors and the very fact that they were there in the physical forms of idols gave power and influence to the people who had made them and controlled their temples. The Hebrews were saved from slavery by a very different kind of God – a God who could not be reduced to the form of a statue and who would not be controlled or limited by anyone. Hmm, it makes you wonder, doesn’t it; was the prohibition against idols about protecting God’s fragile ego (like we often seem to assume) or was it more about making sure that they didn’t develop, in their new country, a class of people who could claim a monopoly on power structures? Was it about making sure that a new class of oppressors, who would create new slaves or slave-like conditions, did not arise among them?

      Or what about the prohibition against “wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God,” or “taking the Lord’s name in vain,” as we sometimes put it. You know how that commandment has been traditionally used by prosperous white folks; it has been used to police and control the language of other people – most especially the language of poor folks and racial minorities. But what would a law like that mean to former slaves? Who had used the names of gods against them? Well, once again it was their oppressors. It was the Egyptians who declared that the power of their gods gave them the right to enslave others. I think that a former slave would understand that misusing the name of a god was actually about misusing that name to enslave others or to gain power over someone else in any way.

      Which brings us, of course, to the Sabbath law. Once again, I think we all know how upper-class white people have tended to interpret that commandment. For them, it has tended to be a very restrictive kind of law. They have used it to put limits on all kinds of activities including on the kind of work that lower class people often have no choice but to do and on the few enjoyable activities that they can afford like dancing or playing games. Over the centuries I think that many people have experienced Sabbath laws as very restrictive things. But, let me ask you, how might a former slave who had been forced to work seven days a week since forever against their will experience a law that said you can't make anyone work seven days a week without breaks? For them, that is all about liberty. That is all about freedom and the exercise of it. Let me tell you, former slaves heard the Sabbath law in a very different way.

      Now, the catechism will give us a chance to focus in on some of the commandments more tightly in the weeks to come. Let me just say that I believe that all of them are transformed when you choose to approach them as if you are presently enslaved or recently emancipated. That one understanding changes everything. For example, did you ever wonder why the Ten Commandments had two laws against theft? One says, “You shall not steal,” and the other says, “You shall not covet? What is up with that? Don’t those two laws accomplish the same thing? Well, I am sure that we will see that that does make a lot of sense if you happen to read the commandments as a former slave.

      The point that I am making is that, when we approach the Bible in a way that comes most naturally to us – with all of our privileges and assumptions and priorities in place – we will draw what seems to be a perfectly obvious meaning out of it. But the Bible itself reminds you that that is not the right approach. Moses tells us to read it through the eyes of another people – through the recently enslaved. He says that only they can truly understand it. So it seems that, if we really want to understand the scriptures, it may be time to shed some of our preconceived ideas about what it means and put ourselves in the shoes of the weak, the abused and the poor. They sometimes clearly get it when we don’t.

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any years ago, I began my journey towards literacy by every day fighting with my brother and sisters over which one of us would be the first to get a hold on one particular page in the Toronto Daily Star: the comics page. Oh, it was glorious, an entire broadsheet covered with black and white comics. It was a great way to practice reading when there were lots of pictures and not too many words and hardly any big ones.

      But there was one problem: I did know that the comics were supposed to be funny but I didn’t always get the joke. And I’m sure that there were times when my parents got pretty tired of me running to them and asking them to explain the joke. Like, for example I remember one very particular comic. It was the Family Circus, one of my favorites, and it showed the Keene family together in church one Sunday morning and one of the children, I believe it was Dolly, is whispering to her mother in the middle of the service. “Mommy,” she whispers, “I think the preacher just said a bad word.”

      I didn’t get it. And I remember going to my mom and asking what bad word a preacher might have said. She thought for a moment and said that she figured that the preacher had probably said “hell.” Now, I’m not quite sure what the moral standards for swearing are around your workplace, I suspect that these days, saying “hell” is pretty tame in most places. But back in those innocent days, using that word could be shocking. But, of course, the exception was that you could talk about hell in the context of a sermon at church. That was the joke.

      In some ways I think that the attitude has flipped today. No, it probably wouldn’t be a great big deal to hear somebody say, “What the hell,” or even, if it was said in fun, “go to hell,” today. But, in some ways, I think we’ve become less comfortable talking about Hell in church. According to some of the statistics that I have seen, most Christian still do believe in a Hell and still believe that some reprobate people will be sent there, but I really get the impression that none of us feels very comfortable talking about it for some very good reasons.

      And I don’t think we’re the first. When the Christian faith first started, it started in a Jewish world that had some very established ideas about what happened to people after they died. The Jews, at that time, did not speak about Hell, which is an English word, they spoke about a place called Sheol. Now Sheol was not exactly the same thing as we think of as Hell. For one thing, they conceived of Sheol as a physical space hidden in the depths of the earth. It was the place where people went when they died but it wasn’t a place of punishment. Nor was it really a place of reward or bliss either. It just kind of was. It was an existence with no remembrance, where no one could speak and where, as we read in the Psalm this morning, you couldn’t even praise God. It was just kind of a dry, bland holding place.

      Now, because of what they had experienced in Jesus Christ – because they had experienced the living resurrected presence of Jesus among them after he had died – the early Christian church had come realize that something very different and much more positive was in store for them after death than a meaningless existence in Sheol. They embraced this new realization with joy, of course, but there was something that bothered them about it.

      They knew that this wonderful eternal hope was theirs because of Jesus. But they were kind people and they worried about those who had not had the benefit of knowing Jesus – in particular their ancestors who, they had always been told, were waiting somewhere in the tediousness of Sheol.

      Now, I will admit that I, with my modern mind, don’t necessarily understand their concerns because we are talking about matters of eternity here. And eternity is not something that we can really speak of in definite terms, especially when it comes to time. Eternity is, by definition, an infinite amount of time and how can you talk about conditions changing within an infinite amount of time? It is not really something that we as time-limited beings can even begin to grasp.

      So however we describe the afterlife – whether we talk about Sheol or Paradise or Heaven and Hell – we are not giving a perfect description. So I am quite happy to accept that both the pre-Christian and the post-Christian descriptions of the afterlife were only imperfect attempts to grasp something that is ultimately ungraspable. They were pointing in the right directions but not completely accurate pictures of that afterlife.

      I believe that the early Christians understood that, but they didn’t really have the words to say it like we might. That is why they did something way better: they told a story. Telling stories, even sometimes completely fictional stories, has always been one of the best ways in which human beings grasp the deeper truths about things. Stories, after all, don’t just give us information, they engage our imaginations. And some of most profound truths about this world can only be grasped using imagination.

      Our reading this morning from the First Letter of Peter makes reference to the story that the early Christians told about the people who had died before Jesus. “Christ also suffered for sins once for all,” it says, “also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, who in former times did not obey, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah.” But it is just a reference. He doesn’t tell the whole story. The people he was writing to had all heard the story that he was referring to before so they all knew what he was talking about. But, of course, we don’t know the story so most of us just scratch our heads and wonder what on earth (or under the earth) he’s talking about here. Many, I am sure, just give up on this passage altogether.

      But I’d like you to know the story that those first Christians told because, while it is not necessarily a story that is meant to be taken literally, it is a powerfully dramatic illustration of the awesome power of God’s redeeming love shown through Jesus Christ. Here is the story:

      You don’t know how long you have been here in this place. You don’t even know if this is even what you would really call a place, but you hear some of the people around you speaking in the greyness from time to time. They are not really carrying out conversations. What they say is more like the ravings of the insane but you have heard them call this place Sheol and that seems like as good a name as any.

      There is only one thing that makes you think that you haven’t always been in this dreary place. There is a little spark inside you. You couldn’t really call it a memory, it is not as specific as that. It is more like a series of images that you carry within you as some precious treasure that you don’t remember how you obtained.

      There is the image of a blazing gold sunrise over the deep green of a forest and another of a bright yellow and red flower. When you concentrate, you can just remember seeing the twinkling eyes of an old woman and the sly smile of a lover. You hear the cry of a tiny baby and even feel the warmth of it clutched against your breast. And then there are the more troubling images. You see a man and his sons building a giant boat, calling out warnings of doom. And you hear the laughter of the people watching. And then there is the terrifying sight of the heavens opening up and the waters rising all around you.

      You honestly don’t know what all of these things mean, but they are all that you have – all that there is to tell you who you are – so you take out these images one by one to ponder them and savour them over and over again. Otherwise your existence, if you can call it existence, is nothing but endless tedium.

      But wait, what was that – over there in that direction – it looked like… it looked like colour. After endless millennia of greys upon greys upon greys, was that a flash of yellow – green – gold? And there is a new sound like the rushing of many waters, like the sudden shout of thousands of voices released from silence. What is going on? It is an invasion! Sheol is being invaded.

      The noise and the light continue to grow until they are all around you. The sound hurts your ears and the light your eyes, but you don’t care about that because you begin to make out a figure approaching you. He is dressed all in white, white so bright that it shines like a star. But as you look at him you see that he has recently suffered great pain. There are wounds on his hands and on his feet and in his side. The blood still looks fresh – bright red. He looks like he just lost the biggest battle of his life, but as you look at his face he looks anything but defeated. He obviously stands before you as a victor and he has come with a power that you have never seen before.

      He looks at you – right at you – and his eyes are filled with love and compassion, and he says to you, “My child I have won the victory, I have won the victory for you. You don’t have to stay here anymore. You don’t have to be bound in meaninglessness and hopelessness any more. You can matter.”

      Behind him, in his train, there is a phalanx of warriors. They too are dressed all in white, though not as bright as him. They are stern and strong as if ready to fight a war, but they all they bear with them are olive branches, a sign of peace, because the war is over. And they cry out together and they say, “Behold how the lamb is worthy, the lamb is worthy that was slain to bring freedom and hope to those who lie in prison. He has triumphed over Sheol, he has triumphed over death itself and his victory is forever and ever.”

      And even as you hear these words you receive them with great joy because you know that they are true. And in that moment that you accept them, the chains that bind you to this place, chains that you did not know had been crafted by your own spirit, they fall away. And you stand up, straightening your spine for the first time in eons, with a great cry of joy. All around you people are standing up likewise and together you form a great throng that is swept up in the wake of the passing victorious Lamb. And on he leads you, upwards and outwards into the light, into the open air and into life eternal. “Behold how the lamb is worthy, the lamb is worthy that was slain to bring freedom and hope to those who lie in prison. He has triumphed over Sheol, he has triumphed over death itself and his victory is forever and ever.”

      That is but a dramatic form of the story that those early Christians told. Why did they tell it? Not, I think, because they knew exactly what had happened in the hidden realms in the immediate aftermath of the crucifixion of Jesus. They told it because they knew the power that was to be found in that crucifixion and resurrection. It was the power of God’s love – love that was so strong that it could overcome any barrier. It could break down the barricades of Sheol and even the gates of Hades would not withstand its assault. They knew somehow that the power that raised Jesus Christ from the dead, the power of God’s love had been demonstrated so clearly that Sheol was needed no more. They told that story to get that truth across.

      That is why I am not overly concerned if Christians today don’t feel very comfortable with the notion of hell, even if they feel a certain obligation to continue to believe in it. The fact of the matter is we shouldn’t feel comfortable with the notion of Hell. It is not compatible with the power of God’s love that has been shown to us in Jesus Christ. It is not compatible with the victory over death and decay that Jesus has won on the cross and as he escaped that empty tomb. Hell is about the power of hate and destruction. Jesus is about the power of love.

      I am not about to claim here that I have a complete understanding of the geography of Heaven and Hell. I honestly feel that it is something beyond our grasp. But I can tell you a story. It is the story of the great and powerful love of God that is able to overcome any power of evil and division and destruction that this world can come up with. That is what we celebrate in the Christian church and because of Jesus. That is the story that I know. And it is the only story that really matters.

The Race to Erase will be held on Saturday, October 13th.

This is a  main fundraiser for Hope Clothing which relies on the generosity of the congregation of St. Andrew's and individuals and groups from the Hespeler Community.

Please consider sponsoring a team or joining at team.

For more information contact Joni at [email protected]

Hespeler, 9 September, 2018 © Scott McAndless

John 3:1-17, 1 John 2:21-25, Psalm 27

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here was once a king in Northumbria (in the northern part of England) – an Anglo-Saxon king named Edwin. And Edwin was a pagan – a worshipper of the old Germanic gods like Thor and Wodin. But Edwin married a half Frankish princess who just happened to be a Christian and that is where all the trouble started.

      His new queen brought some Christian priests with her and they insisted on constantly preaching the Christian message. But the king resisted that message. What need had he for a God like Jesus Christ – a defeated God, a weak God – and not a strong warrior god like the ones that his ancestors had worshipped?

      But the priests persisted. They were very insistent. And so eventually the king convened a meeting of his closest advisors. They gathered in the king’s mead-hall in the dead of winter. They drank the king’s potent mead (which, in case you don’t know, is brewed from fermented honey – yum!) and they talked about whether or not it was prudent to do what the priests were urging them to do. The discussion went on and on with very few viable reasons being offered to take the step of conversion and baptism. But eventually they decided that they would do it. They would convert – they and all Northumbria with them – creating the first beachhead for Christianity in Northern England.

      And do you know what it was that tipped the scales for Christianity – why they decided that that was the way to go? Was it because they thought that Jesus was more powerful than the old gods? No, in all honesty I suspect that they saw Jesus as laughably weak compared to Thor. (I mean, Jesus never made it into The Avengers.) Was it the benefits that might come from Christian learning and literacy? No, they had little time for such things. What convinced them was something that an unnamed courtier said. A sparrow flew through the mead-hall. It flew in out of the cold and snow through one door, swooped over the bemused royal gathering a few times and then out another door and back into the ice and darkness.

      That was when the courtier spoke up. He said that it seemed to him that life in this world is like what happened to that sparrow. According to the Venerable Bede, these are the very words of that courtier: “So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all. If, therefore, this new doctrine tells us something more certain, it seems justly to be followed in our kingdom.”

      What was he saying? He was saying that, as important as this world may seem, it is totally outweighed by the reality that came before it and that will exist after it. Why is that other reality more important? Apparently because of sheer quantity. There is just more of it – an infinite amount, in fact. Infinite time is what we call eternity. That’s just math – eternity is always going to add up to more than even the longest human lifespan. He was saying that the strength of Christianity – the only thing that really recommended it – was that it could claim to know something about eternity and could maybe even give you a leg up in it.

      Of course, he was kind of implying that Christianity was no benefit, or very limited benefit, in this present life. In fact, he may even have been saying that Christianity was a negative thing or caused problems in the present life. I mean, the ancient Anglo-Saxons seem to have had little patience with things like church services and monks and vows. But, he was saying, maybe that was something that they could just put up with for the brief time that they were swooping around the mead-hall for the sake of that enormous amount of time that would come when they were out in the unknown of eternity.

      Now, apparently, that courtier was very persuasive in this observation. He convinced King Edwin, he convinced the theigns and even the pagan priests. Northumbria became Christian and England was changed forever. But I wonder, what do you think of his argument? Is he right? Are we just sparrows who happen to fly through mead-halls? Does the interior of the mead-hall not really matter because the reality that actually matters is to be found beyond the confines of this world? And is the Christian church the only source of reliable information on what that other life is really all about?

      I’ll tell you something: that sparrow might have convinced the old Anglo-Saxons that Christianity was the only way to go – the way of the future – but I am not sure that it is still working its magic on their modern descendants and other western people.

      For one thing, Christians seem to have gotten a bit of a reputation in recent years for being so caught up with their concern for what’s outside the mead-hall that they are only too happy to neglect the inside. Christians, the criticism goes, are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good. There are many, for example, who would blame so much of our present ecological crisis on Christians because some people have used the Christian idea of eternity to justify not taking care of the earth. While we are here on earth, they suggest, we can feel free to take whatever we want from the earth, to profit from its resources, pollute its skies and its seas because we don’t have to worry about the future of this world; our future is elsewhere.

      Now, I would be quick to say that that has definitely not been the attitude of all Christians down through the ages, nor even of the majority. But there has been a small and very vocal and well-funded minority who have been only too happy to preach that message very loudly. They have been so successful that many people do think that is what all Christians believe. So, no, the focus on eternity has not necessarily been a big selling point for Christianity over the last few decades.

      Even more damaging, however is the fact that Christianity seems to have lost the key thing that made it so attractive to the Anglo-Saxons. It has lost the monopoly over knowledge about eternity. The Anglo-Saxons simply accepted that, since they spoke with such certainty, the Christian priests knew exactly what eternity was like and how you got to be part of it.

      How many people today would just accept the notion that only Christians could possibly have anything meaningful to say about the afterlife? What about Hindus and their teaching regarding reincarnation? What about the atheists and their confident assertion that they know exactly what will happen to you after you die? And what about the statistics that indicate that huge numbers of people in our society, who have absolutely no connection to any established religion whatsoever, still profess to believe in an afterlife. So, if we are counting on the idea that we are going to attract people to the church simply by saying that we are the only ones who know anything about what’s outside the mead-hall, we may have another think coming.

      Jesus did talk about eternal life. We are told in the Gospel of John that he gave Nicodemus, that nocturnal Pharisee, what is perhaps the most memorable promise in all of Scripture: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” And if we, by believing in Jesus, may have eternal life, doesn’t that mean that that old Anglo-Saxon warrior is right? If we can have an infinite amount of life outside of the mead-hall, then what is the point of worrying about the brief time that we spend flying around inside the mead-hall? Are we not just here in order to do one thing and that is to make sure that we reserve our place in eternity?

      Well, maybe that would be true if that was what Jesus meant when he made that promise of eternity, but I don’t believe that when Jesus said that, he had the image of a sparrow flying through a mead-hall in his mind.

      What did Jesus mean when he spoke of eternal life? He was speaking of an infinite expanse of time, but here is what is different about his approach to the approach of that Anglo-Saxon retainer: the expanse of time that Jesus was talking about was not merely outside of the mead-hall.

      First of all, Jesus says that eternal life is something that may originate from elsewhere, but it begins in the here and now. Jesus says, “no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above,” and then he says again “no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit.” you see, we tend to think, like that Anglo-Saxon retainer, of eternal life as this thing that is just outside of the mead-hall – outside of our present knowledge and experience. But Jesus speaks of it differently. He is telling Nicodemus that he can enter the kingdom of God (which he later connects to eternal life) and that he can enter it right now. You, Nicodemus, can have it now by being born from above – being born again from God, but it is a new birth that takes place on earth – inside the mead-hall.

      In other words, for Jesus eternal life is not some mysterious thing that happens completely outside of our knowledge. You can know it now. And when I think about it that way, that is a much bigger selling point for the Christian faith than a sparrow flying through a mead-hall because this is how Jesus is thinking of his followers: they are a group of people who, in the here and now, are actively living out life eternal. There is another place where Jesus says, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly,” (John 10:10) and I think that he means much the same thing as when he was talking to Nicodemus. Eternal life, for Jesus is not just an infinite length of time, it is an abundance of life itself – life that overflows in joy, love and service. Now imagine that that was what people knew about Christians, not that they had supposed secret knowledge of some other life outside the mead-hall but that they knew that Christians lived a life so full, so abundant, that it overflowed like that?

      That is why I believe that it is time for the Christianity to stop thinking that we can attract people by saying that we can give them a special mysterious new life someday outside of the mead-hall. Yes, it is good to know that the eternal life that we begin to live here will continue even after we die, but that is not our selling point. The thing that will be truly attractive to people is if we begin to live that abundant life right now. And Jesus teaches us how we may do that. All that is required, he says, is belief – faith. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

      I know that that does not come easily to any of us, but will you commit yourself to do one thing this week: trust Jesus for one thing that you’ve never trusted him for before. Just start with one thing. Trust him for something that has been worrying you. Just let go of the worry and leave it in his hand. Or maybe trust him enough that you can do something that you have been afraid of doing because you know he is with you. Trust him enough to give what you can’t afford to give. Trust him enough to take a risk. Just pick one thing, but do it and do it this week. See if you don’t find a new abundance enters your life because of it. 

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can’t be the only one to notice, am I? The world is kind of a mess. I mean, all kinds of things are just falling apart. Political alliances like NATO and the United Nations – organizations that maintained an unprecedented ( if imperfect) global peace for decades have fallen on hard times. Russia, in particular, seems to be hard at work destroying some of our most cherished institutions like democracy. North Korea is clearly working as hard as ever at creating weapons of mass destruction and putting them in missiles that go ever further.

      And that is just the global political situation. Look at the environmental situation. Even if we somehow manage to avoid blowing up the planet with some weapon or other, that hardly seems to matter because our collective action seems to be destroying the environment and even changing global climate patterns.

      I could go on but you get the point. We seem to have all kinds of reasons to despair for the future these days. It is honestly getting to the point where I am actively avoiding certain kinds of news stories. I don’t remember ever doing that before.

      But that is okay, right? I mean, we’re Christians, aren’t we? And I have been told often enough that Christians don’t really have to worry about the long-term future of this world because it is not our destiny. We ultimately belong to another world because someday, when we die, our bodies will decay and remain in this world but our souls will live on in another, better place. So why would we worry about this world? In fact, would it not be a good and very Christian approach to life to totally forget this world, its needs and its future? “The world is not my home, I’m just passing through.” So why not just take whatever you can from the earth – plunder the forests, the seas, the depths of the earth – because our future is not here.

      I will admit that that is exactly how some Christians do approach life and often how outsiders assume that all Christians think. But I think that most of us would say that it doesn’t sound quite right and indeed it isn’t. But why not?

      The Bible does promise us that we have the hope and promise of an afterlife. Because of Jesus – because of what Jesus has accomplished for us in his death and resurrection – we can look forward to a life beyond this present existence. I believe that and I know that many of you do too, but how are we supposed to reconcile that with a commitment to this present world. We have two questions from the catechism this morning. The first focuses on our hope for a life beyond the present life by talking of our belief in the resurrection of the dead. But the next question asks about hope and the hope that it talks about is very clearly talking about hope for this present world. “We hope for a transformed world in which justice will roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” So which is it? Are we supposed to have hope for this world or just for the next?

      Well, we are not the first Christians to wonder that. The Christians in Corinth were dealing with very similar questions shortly after that church was founded by the Apostle Paul. It was not easy to be a Christian living in Corinth in those days. It usually meant cutting yourself off from your family and from just about everything else. So things were tough for those Christians and they started to give up on this world and many began to think that their only hope was to be found in the next.

      How do we know this? Because of how Paul wrote to them in order to correct them. He asks them an odd question in our reading this morning: “Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead?” Now how can that be? How can a group of Christians, who have heard and clearly believe that Jesus was raised from the dead, possibly not believe in a life after death? It doesn’t make any sense.

      But here is what is going on. It seems clear that those Corinthian Christians did believe in the afterlife. Everything that Paul writes to them in this letter takes that for granted. Paul is not correcting them for failing to believe in life after death but rather for the way in which they are conceiving of that life. Rather than believing in the resurrection of the body, they believe in the immortality of the soul.

      This is not all that surprising, really, because most of the Christians in Corinth were Greeks and the immortality of the soul was a very Greek way of thinking about life after death. It was the Greek Philosophers, especially the great teacher Plato, who first proposed the idea that there was, within the human person, some spark of the divine – a soul – that was, in its very nature, immortal. The body could die and it would decay away, but the soul would live forever.

      Now that is an idea that probably makes sense to many of us, because that is how we generally think about the afterlife as well. I don’t know how many times I have been there at a funeral and seen people look down at the body of their loved one and say, “They are not here anymore, but their soul will live on in another, better place.” The immortality of the soul is our go-to way of talking about life after death.

      But what Paul is pointing out to the Christians in Corinth is that that is not exactly what he taught them when he preached the gospel to them. He didn’t promise the immortality of the soul, he promised the resurrection of the body. He preached that their hope for life after death was found in the fact the God had raised Jesus’ body from the dead. The promise was that since God had done this for Jesus, he would surely do it for them as well.

      So, in this letter, Paul is correcting them for falling back into the Greek way of thinking about the afterlife and so denying the gospel that he had preached to them which was based on God’s power to raise the dead.

      Now I will admit that there is a part of me that wonders why Paul is so concerned about this distinction. We are talking about the afterlife here and, while the New Testament promises of a life after death are clear, I do not believe that the Bible gives us anything like a clear description of what that life will be like. I do not believe that human language has words that could possibly describe what such an existence shall be like. I mean, consider the descriptions that are offered. One passage speaks of streets paved with gold. A lovely image, of course, but it hardly seems like a very good practical or literal description. Do you think that driving on ice is bad? Imagine driving on a street paved with gold?

      No, instead of literal descriptions of the afterlife, what we have in the Bible are images and metaphors. No one can tell us that it is this or that, we can only say that it is kind of like this or kind of like that. And concepts of the immortality of the soul or the resurrection of the body are the same thing – they are simply images that are meant to give us some idea of what that existence will be like.

      So why is Paul so insistent that they must speak of the afterlife in one particular way? It is not that they are wrong. The immortality of the soul is a helpful way to conceive of life after death. But he was commending to them a better way to think about it. But why? What is so much better if you think in terms of the resurrection of the body?

      One part of the answer, as far as Paul is concerned, is that talking in terms of the resurrection of the dead reminds us how we have access to that other life. It is a reminder that we have gained access to the life beyond because of Jesus and especially because of what he has accomplished for us in his life and death and resurrection. It is a reminder that we will be raised because Jesus was raised. And that part of the answer is what Paul particularly focuses on in our reading this morning from his Letter to the Corinthians.

      But there is also another reason why Paul stresses the idea of the resurrection of the dead and it takes us to the heart of the issue that we have been talking about. If you only think of the afterlife in terms of the immortality of the soul, you will naturally tend to devalue the things of this world. After all, your body and all of the physical things that it depends on will pass away. They will turn to dust while your soul lives on through eternity. This makes it easy to assume that the eternal thing is the only thing about you that is important and that the passing things of this world matter not at all. I would say that the idea of the immorality of the soul is one of the key reasons why Christians have developed a bit of a bad reputation for being quite willing to let this world be destroyed because it is all only so much dust.

      But if you learn to think of the afterlife in terms of the resurrection of the body, you cannot think in such terms. Quite simply, such an idea of the afterlife means that the body and the things that sustain the body matter. They matter because God made them in the first place. And precisely because God made them in the first place, God can make them again even after death.

      Now I realize that thinking of the afterlife in terms of the resurrection of the body creates problems and quandaries for us. If our hope is for a resurrected body, well then what will that body be like? Which body will I get after I die? The strong and healthy one that I had when I was eighteen years old or the old and broken down one that I had when I died in my eighties? And what about those whose bodies are destroyed or cremated or eaten by sharks in the sea? Does that mean that they have lost all hope of the afterlife?

      But these questions all miss the point of the idea and the point that Paul is trying to get across. As I said, no one can really say what the life beyond the grave is like. We have not the language to describe it. The resurrection of the dead is not a literal description of what that life is like, it is a helpful metaphor to help us wrap our heads around the meaning of that existence.

      But Paul encourages you to think of it that way for some very good reasons. It is to remind you that your hope for life after death is found in God (and not in some inherent nature of your soul). The God who created you and the God who raised Jesus Christ from the dead is quite capable of raising you as well as giving you a body that you cannot understand now but that fulfills all of your hopes. It is a reminder that, when you die, you will be in the hands of a loving and benevolent God and that is a good and comforting thing.

      But secondly, and I think more importantly, it is there to teach us that our hope is not merely for another world beyond this one. We need not and must not wait to find hope. To work for justice, for what is right and good in this world is not only possible, it is an essential part of being a follower of Christ Jesus, the resurrected one.